


The Language of Birds

by mattador



Series: The Knight of the Star [3]
Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:12:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattador/pseuds/mattador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sir Sagramore's exasperation with Lancelot leads them both to very unexpected places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of Birds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Soujin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/gifts).



 

Some knights measured time in Camelot in feasts; others in quests. Sagramore counted lovers, and by bare number alone, without regard for what was counted, he could rightly say that he had served longer in Camelot than any other.

 

Among the ladies of court and Queen Guinivere’s handmaids, there were the virtuous and the adventurous, and he had courted both. Among the squires, there were the oblivious and the curious, and there too he had sampled many. Among the knights were the lovesick and the jaded, and though they were more challenging targets, he had dallied where dalliances were welcomed, at least among the younger knights. The older knights suited him little, but in truth, that was scarcely a problem.

 

Almost all of Arthur's knights were young, and some were even younger than their age would suggest.

 

Lancelot was one of these. His ignorance of the easy debaucheries of knighthood would have made him a laughingstock among the veteran knights who sat at the Table, but for one thing – he had unhorsed each and every last one of them at tourney.

 

Sagramore's ass was still sore from the fall he had taken when he decided he would take Lancelot under his wing. True, he was only two years senior to the boy – but he had come to Arthur's service already a knight, whereas Lancelot had been knighted by the king's cousin, Gawain, himself so newly-minted that his armor could be polished to a shine. These things mattered – all the more because they sat at a round table, and these matters of rank, status and honor must be tallied and compared only in their heads.

 

It was going to be a merry bit of sport to appall and disillusion the lad, to find the chinks in his social armor and pry open his secrets, his shames, his foibles and faults.

 

No-one was as unstained as Lancelot seemed.

 

He let his intentions be known, quietly but unmistakably, to Sir Dinadan – the subtlest and most wicked-tongued of the younger knights, save only perhaps Sir Kay – and to Sir Ulfius, the most world-weary and world-wise of Uther's old stalwarts.

 

Taking their lack of objection as implicit blessing, he had already plotted the first stratagems in his campaign when Sir Gawain found him and took him aside.

 

Sagramore liked Gawain. He respected him. Gawain was considerate, compassionate, discreet. His sense of propriety made Sagramore's tailbone ache.

 

“I pray you,” Gawain said, mild, cautious, earnest. “Forbear from this game, Sagramore, or choose you your prey more wisely.”

 

“Prithee, Gawain,” Sagramore responded with great cheer, “educate me: have I instructed your hunting and dictated in which manner and season you should chase hart, or fox, or boar? Or maidens, for that matter, when you are so inclined?”

 

“This is no knightly pursuit,” Gawain said, glowering with dour mien. “Nor brotherly.”

 

“Then wellbeit that I am not Lancelot's _brother_ ,” Sagramore said, stressing the word especially, “though I may be his _fellow_. Lancelot is well acknowledged as a game-master in the lists, but he has yet to learn other games that knights play.”

 

“As you will, Sagramore,” Gawain said, and gave way with a sigh. He had been melancholic since he returned from last year's questing, and immediately Sagramore began a second plan to make his friend merry once more.

 

One battle at a time, however. He found the fair-eyed knight in the stables, grooming his monster of a charger and speaking fondly in its ear. Sagramore waited a moment with a smile on his face before he interrupted.

 

“Sir Lancelot!” he called, and bowed courteously, and acknowledged the wide, brilliant, ingenuous smile the young knight gave him as a less affected match for his own. Wonderful. They were all of them friends here at Camelot. And friends played friendly japes on one another. That was all this was.

 

“I understand me that you have been away from royal courts, even the courts at Benoic, since you were but a boy. Meseemeth that you are not yet used to our ways, or the usages of knighthood at court. As you would want to seem as courteous a knight as gallant, I thought we might tarry awhile together, that I might enlighten you?”

 

Lancelot's smile faded, just a little, but he held out his hand and clasped Sagramore's own – he had large hands, long-fingered enough that they appeared delicate until one felt the rasp of calluses from sword-hilt, spear-shaft, and gauntlet.

 

 

 

Phillipa and Alianora were the most knowing girls in the castle – sly, sure of themselves, shrewd and discreet, the smiling educator of many a squire.

 

They were not to be plied with coin, nor wine, nor any gifts or blandishments – they knew their own minds, kept their own counsel, and sated their wants as they saw fit. Sagramore adored them.

 

When he mentioned Lancelot to them, the cherubic Phillipa had dimpled; and practical, clever-fingered Alianora had acidly made sure they were not catspaws in some tease, but accomplices in Lancelot's delightful and promising ruination.

 

When he had assured her that she could deflower the Gaul as thoroughly as a gardener in a thistle-bed, she nodded judiciously. So, when his tour of Camelot and environs brought Lancelot to the queen's tower, they were not unexpected.

 

Lancelot's reaction, however, was.

 

When May came, Sagramore was still chuckling to his paramours about Pure Prince Lancelot. The ladies-in-waiting and chambermaids all seemed to find it terribly charming – indeed, alluring – but the squires laughed with him, and the discreetly indiscreet knights smiled vindictive smiles, as though it were they who had won a joust.

 

Guilt, little and tickling, soured the grapes of Sagramore's conquest. Sir Lancelot was distracted and distant, now, ill at ease among mixed company, and he avoided Sagramore's own company with a thoroughness that quite upset the jockeying of seats at the Round Table. Lancelot never sat beside him, nor across from him where their eyes might meet, but only at angles, so that he lurked in the corner of Sagramore's eye, troubling him, a vertiable second Siege Perilous in his own right. He even went so far as to decline the honor of a position in the Queen's retinue when Guinivere went a-Maying. There was, as ever, fierce competition for her escort among knights and squires alike, but Lancelot left, silently, a little after Sagramore secured his place, so that his cousins Lionel and Bleoberis were given the honor as a sort of compensation-by-association. Gaheris and Agravine stood in, similarly, for the dolorous Sir Gawain; King Pellinore yielded his place to his son and squire, Lamorak; and Sir Dinadan, who had won renown of late, reminded them he had no squire yet to humbly defer to. Sir Palomides, to round out the party, bade his brother Safir accompany them so that, he said, they might have a little levant in their bread.

 

Dressed in their finery – a panoply of greens, that grass-stains would not mar – the party decamped from the castle, flitting gaily as larks across the field. They picked flowers, and laughed, and flirted, and Sagramore weighed the merits of the acerbic, shrewd-tongued Dinadan against the mellow, laconic Lamorak – an uncertain quantity among them as yet, but far and away the most handsome.

 

He had not expected Sir Lionel to seek him out, and expected less that the slender, dreamy-eyed boy would have come to him upon a sober and serious errand.

 

“You do not understand what you did to Lancelot,” Lionel said heavily, and sank back on his haunches in a crouch, refusing to meet Sagramore's eyes.

 

“No,” said Sagramore, a candid whimsy seizing him. “No, I do not. We live our lives at God's mercy. His blessings and curses both may be given and taken away between heartbeats. Not just into death. When I lose myself in battle, when I am taken by a fall or a spasm, do you know where my soul goes? For I do not. But its flights bring me a world of pains. Healers and wizards have done all manner of foulness to cure me – I have drank piss and birdshit as my medicines, and there is no more virtue in them than in the rest of me. But each new concoction, while it brewed and stank aforehand – it gave me hope. So. Perhaps I sin. But each pair of lips – each pair of hips – every paramour is a moment of sweetness and joy the world puts before me, Lionel, and if I am wrong to take them then much else is wrong as well. Why shun pleasure and embrace sorrow? Greet both as they come and fare them well.”

 

“You do not understand,” Lionel said again, dullness replaced by mulish heat. He looked up at Sagramore, and Sagramore was stricken by the pain in his eyes, and the starved want.

 

“The Lady of the Lake protected Lancelot; and for love of him she protected us as well. She educated us and provided for us. Among the fey, she is considered kindly – but they say _seelie_. She is light and warmth and nurturing growth. But she is still fey, and we still dwelt in Faerie. In Faerie, Sir Sagramore, to want is not a sin. It is a transaction.” he took a deep, shuddering breath, and scrubbed his hands miserably on his thighs, in meaningless ablution. “It is a piece of a transaction,” he said. “Hunger, lust, curiosity – each incurs a debt when it is satisfied. If you hunger, that is easy enough. Eat an apple from a tree, then void your bowels by its roots and make the soil richer. Ask a question, and answer another in turn – but be chary of what you ask. Small questions like scouts before your vanguard let you learn without giving overmuch away. Large questions... betray you. And...carnal acts...” he looked away. “For every want satisfied, there can be another incurred. Sometimes, you could pay another price by taking yourself in hand where you could be watched. Shame is as good a coin as any other currency of the heart. But to lend overmuch is as dangerous as to borrow, Sagramore. I cannot barter, not with my heart nor my loins. Lancelot... remained pure, but he also protected us. Interceded for us. When he thinks of bed-sport, he thinks of the price...” he stopped. “You do not understand,” he said again, and Sagramore nodded dumbly.

 

The night was warm, but Sagramore found himself shivering yet in his pavilion. It had been a simple enough game, to embarrass a sanctimonious lummox, to stain him, just a little. Had Gawain known? Certainly Dinadan and Ulfius had not guessed, or they would not so lightly have approved his jape. To strike at another so, in his weakest point, in a place where there could be no defense... and what excuse, that he had not done so knowingly?

 

Before dawn, he had traded his greens for the arms of a questing knight, and ridden out with Urre, his squire. He could follow Lancelot, seek him out, apologize to him. Explain himself, perhaps. He wondered, a little, at the depth of his sudden tenderness, but like as not it was guilt weighing on him. Sagramore was not used to feeling guilt in the wake of his sins. Satisfaction was more usual.

 

He found soon that wherever Sir Lancelot had ridden out to, it was no place near to Camelot. Why he would have ridden out so far, unaccompanied, none who he spoke to could say, but Sagramore reminded himself of that lustful spark caged in Lionel's eyes, and wondered. What could a man do to master that desire, if he would never indulge himself in it? How could he exhaust it, where could he channel it? Ah, God. It was no wonder Lancelot was a demon in the lists, and no wonder that he already had accumulated such deeds to his names older and greater knights envied. _They_ had sane outlets for his energies, and this damned foolish boy had none.

 

He continued his pursuit, seldom finding proof he had drawn closer, for near to a week. His own demons haunted him. Urre was an old hand at assisting him, and only the once, when Sagramore fell from his horse, the boy caught him. They sat that morning waiting for the ache in Sagramore's head to depart, and only when it had did they remount, and prepare to ride out again, when they realized that the crooked glen they had camped in had gone silent of all sound, save for the distant calling of birds. The dew seemed to shimmer, and the morning fog gathered in thick around them.

 

As Sagramore watched, a ship rode out of the mist, carried on it as if on the crest of a wave, through six feet beneath its keel the fog bank billowed over mounded soil. Though he had crossed seas and rivers, Sagramore knew little of boats, but he knew they should have oars and oarlocks; or else rudder and sail, and there were none of these. Simply swooping, graceful lines and curves over un-tarred, unvarnished pale wood, and an elegantly painted figurehead. The figurehead showed a maiden, mantled in feathers, wearing a goose-billed cap that shadowed the delicate valentine of her face, but somehow did not keep the light from her eyes, dark and resplendent and glittering like a pair of smooth and rounded gems, with some hint of color swimming in their murky depths.

 

Aboard the boat was a brown-clad knight with a feathered helm, carrying a vergescu for his shield and plain stout club in the place of a sword. Beside him was a maiden, white-clad but for a brown shawl, her lips curiously orange, who was either inspiration for the figurehead or else sister to it.

 

“Segremors,” she called, “I am come to bid you venture with me, for the sake of your love, who will await you at your journey's end.”

 

“Who might that be?” he asked, curiously, but the maid shook her head and held silent. “Are you certain, then, that you've the knight you seek? Sagramore, not Segremors?” 

 

She nodded gravely.

 

Sagramore shrugged, and shouldered aside his disquiet. He misliked the faerie boat, but he had heard of many a knight who had dallied with fey ladies and returned better-armed, better-blessed, cured sorcerously of their wounds and ailments. They tempted him. In truth, the maiden tempted him as well, and the fair promise of the figurehead, and this unseen lady who would send so grandly for his love. He knew himself, and knew well he was susceptible to flattery, temptation, challenge.

 

After all, how could any call himself a knight and yet turn away such an adventure?

 

“Tarry but a moment,” he said, “and I'll join you gladly, and away to your lady.” Turning, he cuffed his staring squire on the shoulder. “Urre, boy, I suppose I'm leaving you. Take my horse. Ride back to Camelot. Tell them there what's befallen me, and assure them I'll return if I can in time for Midsummer. If I don't return, send for me – though God alone knows where they should send.”

 

He rose in his saddle and turned back to face the boat. “Can you tell me where it is my lady waits?” he asked. The maiden held her silence, but the knight turned fractionally to answer him.

 

“Her home is called Caer Twncoel, upon the isle Ynys Annilysclawwd.”

 

“Aye,” Sagramore said, with heavy seriousness to conceal his mirth. “I'll be lost for sure, then, for I don't know if I can even get such names across my tongue. Ynys Annilysclawwd. Caer Twncoel.” he tested each, and turned back to Urre with a shrug. “Bid them send west,” he said. “Norgales or Sugales, for certain, for only Welsh can twist the tongue so. Can you remember?” Urre nodded.

 

“Good boy,” Sagramore said, and kissed him once upon the cheek and again on the lips. “Ride well.” Making certain of his sword in its sheath and the shield on his back, he hoisted himself up out of the saddle, holding steady with one hand on the bow of the faerie ship, then pulled himself standing off his horse's back to tumble over the gunwale and into the bow, laughing already in chagrin. He must look a bloody jongleur. But how else would one board a flying ship?

 

“I'm ready,” he said, standing, but already he could see the mist flowing behind the maiden and the rustic knight, treetops breaking its surface like reefs and coastal rocks that they drifted between. Damnably, for his stomach's sake, the boat even rocked as though upon the waves.

 

Soon the cloud beneath them was unbroken white, and the wind upon it dragged wisps and streamers, pale fluttering banners that dewed his hair and chilled him as they writhed through the air about the boat.

 

One moment, he was contemplating the mist, and the way its dampness made the silent maiden's clothing adhere to her sides. The next, his throat seized up and his guts knotted in a simple prescient dread. His fingers were tingling painfully, as though they were pricked by thorns or thistles.

 

“Ah, God,” he said in reflexive disgust. “I beg you -”

 

There are a number of things he should have like to beg from a number of people, and he is lost in them for a moment. God. Many things he should like to beg of God, or to bargain, demand, tantrum. His father, mayhap, to grant him one boon and delay dying a few decades. Sagramore has no great wish to be an exiled king, an exiled and un-respected prince is trouble enough. Gawain, to cheer his frosty heart from its lovelorn melancholy. Gawain is immune to Sagramore's usual cure for such, and besides, he would prefer not to shock him. Dinadan, not to hide from him in such shame at what they've shared. Damn the man. And foremost among the damned, he thinks, Priggish Pure Prince Lancelot. Trying to bed the boy with a chambermaid had been a jest and a kindness – ah, one meant to put a dint in Lancelot's perfection, his unsullied acceptance of the world as a place of simple, understandable virtues – but that too would be a favor, if one born of envy and cynicism. He would beg Lancelot's forgiveness. His understanding. Just one hour of his time, to explain – that which he knew, and had yet to explain to himself.

 

For that matter, he would beg a more comfortable bed. Where has he laid him down tonight? Someone nearby is stirring. More than one. Ah, Sagramore, what beautiful shame have you committed now, and then drunkenly forgotten?

 

Not drunkenly. He found he was in the bottom of the boat, while maid and brown knight alike knelt beside him in some concern. The color of the sky was different than before. He wondered how long it had been – but then, thank God, it was just after dawn, and the colors changed swiftly. A moment, a thought, and again he found his tongue.

 

“I hope I did not strike you,” he said. His hands felt bruised. Drumming against the boat, he hoped. Ah, God. At least he had not shit himself.

 

A glance down, as the maid shook her head in solemn reassurance, and he saw that they had stripped him of mail, shield, and sword, and put him in feasting-clothes, fine silks of brown and vermillion. Not his own, though they fit him sell enough. For a moment, he tensed, seethed, bit back hot, resentful words. No. To disarm a flailing stranger was a prudent thing, perhaps even a mercy. Though their choice in how to array him thereafter was, he confessed, somewhat odd. His new love's colors, all before he had met or said word to this faerie lady? Perhaps he had shit himself. He resolved not to ask.

 

“Your arm,” he said to the knight; and, grasping it when proffered, stood. He waited. There would be questions. There would, most like, be shock, revulsion, fear, pity. Often all of these. He would explain. He had what the ancient Greeks called the Sacred Disease; what the Romans termed Morbus Comitialis, the disease of the assembly hall, a divine curse. No, he could not say if God loved him or hated him, but Julius Caesar had suffered it as well, so surely at least God was paying attention to him.

 

They returned to their vigil. They asked him nothing. That was more troubling than all else they had done together. He found that as much as he had always hated the questions, their absence discomfitted him more. So he turned back to watching the mist pass beneath them and the sun rise above them, and shivered.

 

The mist beneath them thinned now until he could see through it – could, perhaps, see its source. A clear lake over shining white sand lay below them, shallow enough he could see the shapes swimming in its depths – great shapes, more equine than piscine. Mist curled up from its unquiet surface, which roiled and bubbled and heaved like a kettle set too close over a fire.

 

“Llyn Berwdwr,” the knight intoned. The maiden stepped to his side, and drawing her arm past him, pointed to a flash of silver that shone narrowly across the lake's surface far away. “Sarn Cleddau,” she said – and finally, at last, there was a word that stood out. _Llyn_ was lake; _Ynys_ island, _Caer_ castle – there were a hundred such places. Sarn he was unsure of, but _Cleddau_ \- “What?” he asked. “Do you speak of a sword, ma demoiselle?”

 

“It is the only path from the shore to the island,” the maiden said. “and the only path from the island to Caer Twncoel. You may alight beside it.”

 

That did not, Sagramore noted, answer his question. “You mean you won't simply dock at a battlement or an aerie?” he asked, whimsical, and was unsurprised to be met with silence. He hoped this lady spoke more.

 

As the thinning fog parted beneath them, their keel settling deeper, descending, Sarn Cleddau drew closer until Sagramore could perceive it plainly. It was no path, but a sword blade half a hand wide and of impossible length, lying across the narrowest point between isle and shore an arm's length above the churning waters. As if it had been swung to strike the isle, it passed between a broad cleft of riven rock along the edge of the beach, then once again over the water after its brief brush with the land. Here it seemed to pierce the side of a tower of white stone, from which was suspended a castle. Its foundations rested on the air, and the tower of its far corner rested on the lake's other shore. The arch between them, more like a true bridge, was shrouded in rolling steam from the waters beneath it.

 

It was a mad sort of fortress, and from all Sagramore could see, only the near tower had any door, a portcullised gateway upon a narrow ledge, from which the glinting point of Sarn Cleddau emerged. Sagramore wondered if walking along it back to the far shore would reveal its hilt, embedded in lakeside mud.

 

Finally the prow angled between the cloven rocks beside the improbably steel causeway, and Sagramore stepped over the gunwale before he thought him to look back. “Whither are you bound next?” he asked. “Are you to await me, or depart as soon as I am ashore?”

 

He received no answer. The maiden, he thought, no longer seemed such a comely temptation to him. Just as well, if her lady awaited. He disembarked with no further delay.

 

Stepping upon the blade of the Sarn Cleddau, he was glad at once that his shield and mail were left behind on the boat. Finding his balance on the quivering strip of metal that bowed and bent beneath his feet – it would be all but impossible weighted with armor. Harder yet for any hostile knight, with a shield on one arm and a sword in hand skewing his weight to one side.

 

Even now, he stretched his arms to either side, teetering along the causeway and listening to the watery singing of flexing metal. The ridges of the blood channel on the sword helped his feet find their grip, but still the thirty feet he had to cross took him three anxious, sweating minutes. The steam of the lakewater did not ease his mind. If he should fall now into another seizure or spasm... he cursed silently and wobbled as he stepped off the fast-narrowing tip of the blade where it punctured the floating flagstone terrace before Caer Twncoel's door.

 

There was no wicket door, no bell-pull, no door knocker. He raised one hand to rap a fist against the portcullis, remembered that he would be using a bare hand, not a mailed fist, and turned it to protect his knuckles, thumping his forearm against the metal bars. They chimed, vibrating strange music – not a sound he had ever heard from iron, but he had no guess at what else the dark metal might be. He waited.

 

Perhaps only a minute passed, but a long minute, before the great inner doors – not wooden, he thought, but one of horn and one of ivory, stained to this fine-grained darkness – creaked, and opened but a sliver, leaving the Lady of the castle haloed in the torchlight of her hall.

 

She wore a brown-dappled dress, pleated and herringboned. As she moved, it rustled as though it were truly made of feathers. Like the maiden's, her lips were more saffron than red. Her nose was prominent but not unhandsome, and her eyes were like a starry sky, inhuman, glittering, captivating. She viewed him with cool detachment, a buyer looking over her horse.

 

It was, Sagramore confessed to himself, both alarming and alluring, in turns. She was not lacking in beauty, though neither was she what he looked for. And if she could heal him – empower him – then it would be no great task or hardship to be her lover.

 

“Milady,” he said, with a bow and a smile. “As you summoned me, so I have come.”

 

“So you have,” she said distantly, the Welsh burr of her voice as soft as down. She said no more.

 

“May I know who has called me?” he asked, gently enough, he hoped.

 

“You may call me Gwyddrhiain,” she said, as though it was a gift bestowed on him. “And who is it I have called?”

 

He frowned. She had called. Should she not know? He dismissed the question, and smoothed his brow.

 

“Sir Sagramore,” he said, with a bow and a flourish. “My father was King Caradoc Aurifaber of Keszthely in Pannonia. My mother is Queen Itilaria of Byzantium, and through her, I am an heir to Estrangore as well, and claimant to the Byzantine throne. I have ridden both against Arthur and for him, and the knights of Logres who have overthrown me can be counted on one hand.”

 

her thin, peculiar lips twisted in a disappointed moue. “Unworthy,” she pronounced. “Most unworthy.” The look in her eyes seemed to pierce him, pass through him, as though it were focused behind him. “I had hoped for better than a false lover such as you. False to your heart, and craven, as men so often are. I shall have none of you.”

 

“I beg your pardon?” Sagramore asked. The notes of this ballad seemed to sour around him, an unexpected discord. This was not as tales would have it. Not as faerie ladies were said to treat their loves.

 

“I grant it,” she said, decisively. “You will yet serve me, Sagramore. You will remain on Ynys Amilysclawwd, a test for truer suitors who come. There will come a man who is true in love. One day, he will come. But you – your falseness binds you here.” Her words seemed to fly at him, echo around him, with a sussuruss of wings, battering at his temples. Outrage pooled behind his lips, ready to be spilled forth, and then the brown-clad champion from the boat was standing beside him, cudgel raised. One blow, and Sagramore was flung from the ledge. He felt the heat roll from the water beneath him, and then, blessedly, he was flat on his back on the churned sand of the beach. Mist and steam rose in a hissing torrent from the strait. When it had cleared, the castle doors were closed. Gwyddrhiain and her champion were both gone from sight.

 

“As courtships go,” Sagramore said, “I have fared better. Never worse, though.”

 

It was, perhaps, a cheering thought – until it brought Lancelot to the fore of his mind. But that had not been a courtship, had it? Fair-eyed but plain-faced, he would not have even said that the Gaul was handsome enough for him to consider. But he remembered Lancelot's eyes, and Lionel's eyes; and he considered what had lead him to jealously prick at Lancelot so; and what had lead him to follow, after.

 

There was enough else to occupy him, but still, in the back of his mind, he could not quite put the thought aside.

 

Ynys Annilysclawwd was a haunted place, an autonomous kingdom with its own laws, capricious and rigorous, obeyed by sun and cloud, tree and season, by path and cup and blade as surely as by any pious citizen. To Sagramore it was as incomprehensible as drink or seizure ever made the world, but as he was familiar with both, he greeted each new stricture with resigned equanimity.

 

Nothing could pierce the top of the mist, no matter how high he climbed – he proved it with a lightning-struck oak on a barren hilltop. He clung to it with his thighs and stared at the bottomless beclouded sky. The ground was as veiled and distant as the stars, and kept to its mysteries as coyly.

 

The cold strand was strewn with mist as thick and clinging as cobwebs, somehow unwarmed by the seething boil of the lakewater adjoining it. As he made his way along the beach, Sagramore found time and again dead men, half-buried in the sand. Many sat, curled as in grief, watching the waters. Many more were knotted or entangled in violent trysts, their swords passed through the bodies of their fellows, great rents in their armor and the sodden, ag

é

d cloth of their garments showing where wounds had felled them as well.

 

So. He was not Gwyddrhiain's first guest. Walking close enough to the shore that the wash of incoming waves scalded his feet, he saw more bodies – bones boiled clean of their flesh.

 

He retrieved the strongest and princeliest shield from the dead men's arms – a round ivory shield, bound in dark iron but chased with golden traceries. The iron was unrusted, and ivory, unlike wood, would not rot in this damp and isolate Hell. He replaced his helm as well, for one with a cowled faceplate. It looked fearsome, which suited him. He hefted the swords the corpses had carried, but in the end he drove each point-first into the ground, crude crosses to honor them. None was obviously enchanted. Not even, to his chagrin, the long, light blade he had found laying among the rocks, with no corpse to claim it. A sword from a stone it might be, and that would suit him, but he had hoped for unnatural aid in this unnatural place. The armor he selected piecemeal, a greave here, a vambrace there, mismatched gauntlets and a scaled overcoat of mail coming last. The coat was unrusted, but its back was rent and bloodied. It was the best he had seen.

 

He found a merry spring of sweet water, warm but not like to cook him; and a fruit- tree hung with mingled apples and pomegranates that bled disconcertingly when he bit into them.

 

He would not starve. Now, there was naught for him to do but wait for one of this promised opponents to appear. The charnel-ground of the beach made it plain that was no empty threat. Many of the dead still had flesh upon their bones. He did not think it would be overlong.

 

Days later, but not yet weeks, he was not disappointed in his expectation.

 

With the sand-caked skulls of dead knights presenting him with an avid crowd of spectators, Sagramore was spurred from wariness to fear to battle-lust in the space of three heartbeats. Wet sand crunched underfoot, somewhere up the beach, accompanied by the jingling of mail.

 

It was the sound he had awaited since he gave up pacing the edge of the scalding surf. He had a new suitor to meet, and both he and this rival had seen how Gwuddrhiain's suitors quarreled with one another.

 

He wondered, idly, testing the edge of his sword on one scarred thumb, if she had ever taken a lover. If any from among this chorus of corpses had ever been plucked out as worthy. He wondered, too, how many prisoner knights ran mad in the lonely damp and came back to her gates as supplicants, praying to woo her. Would that be his own fate? How long would lack of society wear on him before humbling himself to his tormentress seemed sane?

 

The other knight came closer in the mist. Now Sagramore could see his shadow. He gritted and ground his teeth; bit his lip until it was salted with blood. Was this willing champion, or a brother-prisoner? What had he been told? Would he be friend or foe – and if foe, would he be as weary, sore, and hungry as Sagramore, or fresh and hot-blooded?

 

Color bled slowly through the mist. This knight wore brown, and a great beaked helm shadowed his brow. That, Sagramore thought, was answer enough.

 

“Draw, unhappy knave!” he cried, laughing aloud, and ran forward, feeling fever break out and sweat his brow. Sagramore would have been but an indifferent knight, he knew, but that his curse could become a reckless, edgéd blessing. In battle he was hot and heedless and his anger sang its way to a pitch that broke and consumed him nigh every time his life was threatened. Fearless, unmindful of his own life, engaged in a spastic, vicious dance, he carved a more aggressive line than any he knew. His strokes were wide, wild, unpredictable.

 

He never felt stronger. He never felt more powerless.

 

Sometimes, he knew nothing of the battle. Others, he watched, but he could not truly say it was him that fought.    
_He_   
had never let himself be so enraged.

 

He fell upon the Brown Knight with a scything blow, passing above the lax-held shield. At the last instant, shouting surprise, his rival beat the blade away, ducking back before the strike could do aught but draw harsh music from his scaled coat.

 

“Poorly done,” the Brown Knight growled, and met his rush sidelong, moving in crabwise diagonals, making canny feints with his sword while he left his shield temptingly, suggestively low – carelessness or invitation, Sagramore was in no state to discern.

 

He lunged forward again, stabbing high, and bit only air. The pommel-stone of the Brown Knight's sword made a resounding impression on his helm and skull, and Sagramore staggered. No. He could not let him find balance. Rather than swing, he closed the distance between them leading with his shoulder, and butted his scalloped, rusted pauldron up to connect with the Brown Knight's chin. He laughed again as the man – if he was a man – stumbled backward, lips bloodied upon his own teeth.

 

The Brown Knight swore, his voice thick and furious – not the measured, milk-bland voice of Gwyddrhiain's champion from the boat. His fellow? His replacement? Sagramore felt the tremor in his muscles. It mattered not. The Knight was a dead man. Now he swung his sword again, arcing low, questing around shield's edge to jam itself between scales of armor and test the mettle of the ringed leather beneath. Metal shrilled, squealed, bent – but held. If he was lucky, the Brown Knight's ribs had not fared as well. If he was not – he was not. The return blow caught Sagramore unawares, cleaving the ivory shield to a point just above where it was strapped to his arm, sword point pricking the meat of his bicep as, caught, it slipped forward, smashing blow became a thrust.

 

But that sword, Sagramore saw, was still caught in the cloven shield. He wrenched and twisted his arm sideways, rotating the shiled. The sword point turned in his wound, rounding it like the deft spin of a whittling knife, and he felt the familiar dizzy lightness as his blood gushed forth.

 

But the Brown Knight's wrist twisted as well, and his fingers sprang free of the hilt. Sagramore's sword arm rose of its own volition, and smote his opponent across the brow, peeling the cap of the helm away from its rim – and revealing, beneath it, the pale and bloodied face of Sir Gawain. Sagramore choked on his own voice, a sob or a shout that smothered, unspoken, as he flung his sword away, arms quivering, grasping one hand with the other so he could be certain he could not strike another blow. His rage fled, even swifter than his blood.

 

Gawain toppled like a felled tree, his face expressionless and washed in scarlet. Sagramore took one shuddering breath, then another. Please. Let his body not betray him now. He knew bitterly well he could not master it, could not force it into compliance, and that his prayers on the matter were answered by a randomness that bespoke indifference. He sank to his knees. Not now. Not now--

 

He held his breath.

 

Within a minute, he concluded, his prayer was heard. The haphazard jitter of his muscles subsided. Hurriedly, he tore cloth from his tunic and bound it about his arm; about Gawain's split scalp. A lifetime of tending accidental wounds had lavished him with a healer's attentive, methodical skill, washing the flesh clean of sand and soil, pressing split edges together, tying the cloth in place tightly – wrong-handed, if he had to.

 

Gawain yet breathed. His skull felt intact. But he was pallid, eyes unfocused, one pupil staring wide while the other did not. And it had come at Sagramore's own hand – unprovoked, unexcused. Unrecognized. Sagramore wept.

 

Gawain muttered direly, half-fevered, half-asleep; and for a day Sagramore could get no sense from him. Slowly, Sagramore prised from him fragments of story. He, too, had come by cloud-riding boat, to serve his love; but he had thought he knew who that meant, and why faeries might aid him or summon him to her. He cursed himself for a fool, he said, for not asking the name of the place they were bound.

 

“I did,” Sagramore said, hoping Gawain was wakeful enough to know the world about him, and hear. “Caer Twncoel, upon Ynys Annilysclawwd. A castle and an island. Neither is lacking in Wales.”

 

“Caer Twncoel,” Gawain whispered to him with a grimace. “Castle Broken-trust. Ynys Annilysclawwd. The Isle of False Knights.”

 

Sagramore sighed. “I speak Latin,” he said. “And the languages of Hun, Goth, and Saracen. That I have mastered English should be accounted miracle enough, without testing my tongue's prowess by asking me to untangle Gaelic or Brythonic speech.”

 

Gawain smiled feebly. He had been asked to dress in feasting finery, though unlike Sagramore he had retained his sword. When, over the lake, he learned the island's name, he had drawn and demanded they turn back. He and Gwyddrhiain's servant had all but cut the boat to pieces around them, and the moment they were above dry land Gawain had clouted the fey knight over the head and knocked him from the boat. Following, and taking up the fallen knight's arms, he had begun a search for an escape route. All he had found for his troubles was a thorough cursing from the Lady Gwyddrhiain, perched safely on her battlements.

 

“So I am trapped because I am false in love,” Gawain murmured. “Aye. That I knew, e'en before she said it.”

 

Sagramore dabbed at his bandaged brow with a wet cloth, and waited.

 

He tried, now, to have hope. Urre spoke no more Welsh than he did – and less English! – but if he carried this news back to court, and pronounced those names correctly, the King would be up in a trice, and sending half the Table in quest of him. He was sure of that much. Arthur was a trusty and a noble liege, if a little mothering. 

 

But was there, Sagramore wondered, yet one knight of the Table who could be said to be true in love? He shrugged. Then he made a wry face at the sleeping Gawain, and followed it with a grimace. He knew who could be coming for them. The next day he moved their makeshift camp to be within sight of the Sarn Cleddau. How long would it be?

 

One day more; and Gawain fared no better from it.

 

Lancelot crossed the flexing, edg

é

d bridge in full panoply, eyes ahead and walking rapidly. He did not, Sagramore saw, even extended his arms to the side. It was as though the possibility that he might fail or fall had never occurred to the man.

 

“Sagramore,” he said, with serious earnestness. “The lady whose demesnes this is is no friend to mortal knights. We should quit this place forthwith.”

 

Sagramore laughed, delighted despite himself. “You are an epiphany, sir,” he said, and bowed, nigh-unmocking. “But I am snared and ensorcelled, as is Sir Gawain – and he, wounded sore as well.”

 

“Gawain,” Lancelot said, in a smaller voice. “Her champion-”

 

“Her champion hits like a pageboy,” Sagramore told him. “I... I was by far the more deadly to him.” The explanations choked his throat and silenced him. Even the thought made him seethe with anger, as boiling-hot as the lakewater. He would make no excuses to Lancelot.

 

Lancelot nodded gravely.

 

“Ah,” Sagramore said. “Not even surprised. Am I that depraved and despised?”

 

Lancelot's face tightened, a severe grimace. “No,” he said shortly. “You say you are ensorcelled. It is a state I know, I think, better than you. It bears no surprises for me.”

 

“Then turn round and go back,” Sagramore told him, permitting himself the indulgence of bitterness to season his self-pity. “Send for your squires, if they are virgins yet. See if you can fetch out Gawain, because for all his dolorous moanings I doubt he has sinned in love, and that is what binds me here. This isle is a prison for false lovers, and I am most perfect made of all knights to fit in this trap. Well you should know it.”

 

Lancelot shook his head. “To the fey,” he said, with ponderous deliberation. “To the fey, a false lover is something different than how a Christian would accord it.”

 

'One who cheats at his transactions, I suppose,” Sagramore said drily. “Or reneges on agreements with business partners?” Lancelot looked up, startled.

 

“I spoke with Lionel,” Sagramore told him.

 

“Perhaps not long enough,” Lancelot said, heatlessly. “No. The fey do not prize fidelity to others. Even their adherence to bargains – it is to their own word that they feel loyalty, not to others. Their own... desires.”

 

Sagramore refrained from observing that being loyal to one's own desires seemed more sensible to him than any more rigorous, external doctrine. Then he thought on the matter a moment, and frowned.

 

“Do you mean that they do not see carnal indulgence as a sin?” he asked. “That knowing more than one's lawful spouse is no taboo to them?”

 

“Not unless there is a contract that binds them otherwise,” Lancelot said.

 

Sagramore made an exasperated noise deep in his throat. “Then to be a true lover...”

 

“Is to own faithfully to one's desires and amorous bargains,” Lancelot said.

 

“Then _why_ the devil would she call me false?” Sagramore found himself vexed beyond reason. Of all the ladies in Logres, finally, Gwyddrhiain might be suitable for him – not a constraint on him, nor a disapproving angel. Sagramore was not made for marriage, and had long known it – and he made certain all his partners knew the same. Satiety, not attachment, was the goal of each assignation. And a faerie, it seemed, ought to understand that.

 

Lancelot shook his head. “Like any matter of fey honor, you can only answer that yourself,” he said. “For my part, I know that I would be accounted most woefully false as a lover – and Gawain might sin by the reckoning of faeries, but still be unattainted by that of the Church, as you say.”

 

“Sinning against love,” Sagramore mused. He should be a paragon of virtue, should he not? He found the notion laughable, that to a faerie he would seem true, and Lancelot and Gawain incurably given to vice. A fine jest, if some twist of it did not condemn him to a life on this island.

 

He looked at Lancelot. The other knight seemed restless, doleful, guilty. He had been raised by the fey; even if he had not adopted their ways, no wonder if he felt a burden of guilt. Guilt and shame and fear, twisted around him at even the thought of pleasure...

 

It was, perhaps, a distress Sagramore could rescue him from. Certainly there was no more skilled tutor on the subject of guiltless love. Another laughable notion, of course. But there was something to it. Lancelot might not act on his passions, might not be subject to them, but he felt them as strongly as any other, that was plain. If only he were amenable, perhaps Sagramore could absolve him of this faerie sin...

 

It came to him how tempting that thought was, and with only another moment he realized his own transgression.

 

“I am ever one to let myself succumb to temptation,” he said, slowly, not quite looking at Lancelot. “It is, I think, the only way to defeat it... but even I have wants I felt better unexplored. Targets I would not aim for...”

 

Lancelot shivered, and nodded in glum agreement. 

 

“I know what keeps me here,” Sagramore said, and Lancelot lifted his head, listening more fully. “For you, I think, the advances of faerie ladies have long been a terror. Did faerie lords, as well...”

 

Lancelot glanced at him sharply. “My godmother kept no male servants, and few male guests,” he said/ “No. Only the maidens...”

 

“Hardly maidens, I suspect,” Sagramore said, and briefly, nervously, licked his lips. “I... I may see our way out of this trap. Lancelot... I have only one crime against desire to expiate. If the notion is not too wild, I could, I think, lend you assistance in your own atonement...” it was the most faltering proposition he had ever made – but, it seemed, too shocking by far for Lancelot. Sagramore watched for the moment it took him to understand Sagramore's words.

 

Without warning, eyes wild, he leapt to his feet, a man hunted and hounded, and tore off into the woods. Tears were in his eyes as he did, and he had bitten his lip until it bled. The mist swallowed him, and he vanished.

 

“Lancelot!” Sagramore shouted into the echoless sea of fog. “I pray you, Lancelot! Come back. It was no jest this time!” He felt fear stir in his chest, its wings rustling unquietly. “Lancelot!” he called again, and imagined he could hear the mist-caught yell fading in the distance, caught and dragged down by the damnable grey shroud.

 

“I need you,” he said more quietly, an unknightly sentiment that ought to shame him. An admission.

 

“Damn your eyes, Lancelot, I can't get off this island without you!” But there was little enough reason, he thought, why Lancelot should care for that. Little reason, if any, for Lancelot to wish him anywhere but trapped in a fey-wracked godforsaken corner of Surgales. He had been raised by a faerie himself. Perhaps he did not even find it objectionable, to be trapped here.

 

No. He knew already that was wrong. And the island was not over-large. He returned to Gawain, and fed him pieces of red-fleshed and bleeding apple. His color was a little better now. All the same, the island was not doing his health any favors. The sweetness of the fruit made Sagramore's lips twitch in distaste now, after a week of nothing else. He had seen a goose waddling across the beach at one point, and salivated at the thought of meat; but given where they were, he thought it might be unwise.

 

It was nightfall by the time Lancelot returned, silent but not at all shamefaced. He carried with him swords, maces, shields; and a rope of corded and knotted tunics and breeches, tied to the haft of a hook-bladed axe.

 

“There is another way,” he said. “We can storm the castle. Ascend the wall. Force the lady to grant us our freedom, or simply find the postern gate, or descend the far wall.”

 

Sagramore regarded him for a long minute with amazement. Finally, he voiced but a single objection, gesturing as he spoke.

 

“Gawain could not climb it,” he said. There was no need to say that perhaps the rope would not hold together at all, that it would be easy to cut the rope and drop them into the boiling lake, that they had no way of knowing whether or not Gwyddrhiain housed a company of fey knights in her towers. They could not abandon Gawain, and well they both knew it.

 

“If we could force the lady to promise us safe passage-”

 

“The Lady of Castle Brokentrust,” Sagramore said, drily, and Lancelot's eyes flashed.

 

Silence resumed.

 

“You have never learned the necessity of surrender,” Sagramore observed after a moment. “That some things in the world are beyond our will to control. I have read you amiss all along, Lancelot, and I repent of it heartily.”

 

Lancelot looked a question at him.

 

“Lionel spoke with me,” Sagramore said. “He showed me how I wronged you. Had I known...” He shrugged. “But now, I think, I know you better than you know me, and I know some truths you do not. I had thought that your perfection was an act; or that it came easy to you. One I resented, the other I envied – because on the surface of things, Lancelot, you appear to accept the world as it is. To have peace, and surety.”

 

Lancelot laughed, and Sagramore shook his head. “Lionel taught me better,” he said. “But still I wonder. The way you throw yourself at challenges, showing no doubt, giving yourself to the moment... that is a surrender too, and I marvel that you learned it. I know a little of what it is to relinquish control; to surrender – whether it be to joy or sorrow, in shame or in some greater harmony, my body has lessoned me well in this.”

 

Now Lancelot shook his head, and looked on him uncomprehending. Sagramore chose not to laugh.

 

“You understand me as little as I understood you,” Sagramore said. “I would be plain. A fool would think us peas in a pod – the deposed prince of Benoic, the fled prince of Pannonia, gathering arms and allies for our fathers' glory. But I was never regarded a strong prince, Lancelot, nor fit as a knight. You have been defined by discipline. I have been hemmed in all about myself by a weakness beyond the conquest of any art or exercise. My grace in battle is the rage I fall into, the fearsome aspect, the heedless courage – born though it is of blindness.

 

“And I spoke before of release, of surrendering to joy. Well you or any man might think I counted these things as gifts. But I loathe weakness, and randomness, and all that is taken beyond my reach. If I never lost my fear in battle again, I would welcome it, even and it left me weak and craven. I take the pleasure I can, where and when I can, because _there_ I can choose my surrenders. 

 

“I do not scorn choices freely made, even where I do not understand them. It was never your purity or your prowess I envied. It was that blithe ease of yours as you ran across that bridge. What possesses you, to surrender your will to duty so simply?”

 

“Faith,” Lancelot said.

 

“Faith,” Sagramore echoed. “In God's Will you may find comfort, but I have been given no such blessings or graces as yours unleavened by grief.”

 

“I trust God,” Lancelot said. “But also Arthur, Logres, and the Code of the Table we swore by. I trust the chivalry and courtesy of my brother-knights, as Sir Gawain taught me to when I first met him. I broke my spear on his shield, and he leant me another. I unhorsed him, and he honored me for it, and knighted me ere the wounds I delivered him had mended.”

 

“I am _not_ Gawain,” Sagramore said.

 

“No,” Lancelot agreed, perhaps over-readily. “But that does not mean you are not worth my faith. You speak easily of weakness. But in truth, I would say that not one knight at Arthur's table has shown me the courage you have against their own _infirmities_ – and nor have they the honesty to make clean confession, or live as their heart demands of them.”

 

“Courage against the world is simple,” Sagramore said dismissively. “Courage against one's self... but come, Lancelot. Surely you have never shrunk from the lists. If I am honest, let us be honest. I know how this subject pains you. I would not press. And yet... were I you, beyond the fear – and believe me, knowing what I know now I understand that well! – are you not also curious?”

 

“I am curious,” Lancelot murmured, looking down and away. “How not? Like a priest, you stand gatekeeper to a mystery I have long contemplated, but never known. But I would sin, Sagramore, sin against you and be trapped yet – because what is in me, burning and bound, is not meant for you. I wonder at you. But in my heart... and all the weight of my sin within it... that is directed to one who does not know me, and never may.”

 

“Then love as I love,” Sagramore said, and touched Lancelot's cheek – fevered with passion, whoever he thought of. Deep, honest lust, the kind of longing Sagramore had oft known, but never denied – not as Lancelot had. “I absolve your sin, if absolve I must, but it is your sin I would have against me, shared with me – not your heart, Lancelot. Just your body.”

 

Lancelot flushed and ducked his head away.

 

“Freely,” Sagramore whispered. “No obligations, no mandated exchanges. Pleasure for pleasure, as it comes. Will you?”

 

“I do not know,” said Lancelot, slowly, “what I am doing.” It was a warning, and also – blessedly – an assent. Sagramore smiled. 

 

“Never fear,” he said. “Like most lessons, it is best taken in steps –gradually – with a learned tutor. First...”

 

He bent in, slowly, to steal a kiss from Lancelot's lip, split and scabbed as it was, and Lancelot flinched and turned his face away. Sagramore sighed.

 

“Is it such a terrible prospect?” he asked. “Have... my pardon. Have you never kissed?”

 

Lancelot flushed a yet deeper hue, and shook his head, not in confirmation but in denial. “I have kissed,” he said, low and hoarse. It was a confession, Sagramore thought, and realized – it was the fact that he kissed, the nature of those kisses, that posed the problem.

 

“No,” he said. “You have been kissed.” The tone of his own voice, chiding, startled them both. “You have been kissed,” he said again, and now it was an acknowledgment – you have been wounded. Sagramore slid back away from him, and realized only then that he had come close enough to feel the heat of Lancelot's body. “Let us try it differently, then.”

 

To his credit, Lancelot understood him at once. He bent forward, nervous, eager, and placed his lips on Sagramore's own. A moment, and then he leaned away again, breathing hard. 

 

It was slow, but their lessons progressed apace. Brief kisses, brief touches, always with permission asked and acquired before Sagramore moved close, into the spaces where Lancelot was sovereign. They had, as yet, done little but kiss that any clergyman might see as sin, when Lancelot, prodigy in study that he was, over-eager and long denied, began, with an air of panic, to shed his clothing. Sagramore forced himself to look away. If he watched, he thought, Lancelot would take that as a robbery. Perhaps faerie morals were not for him, after all, if every thing had to be weighed and measured and balanced.

 

Instead, he shed his own clothing, slowly, giving Lancelot time to look on him after he had finished. It was not a role he generally occupied – that of a coy maiden, the tempter rather than the tempted – but it bothered him little.

 

Then they were nude, and Lancelot was shivering. Sagramore guided him down to the warm sand at the verge of the lake, and bid him lay down beside the spread of their shed clothing, before he realized it was not the cold that made this – the boldest of knights – shiver. Then he knelt beside him.

 

“Easy,” he said, as he would to a skittish colt, and trailed his fingertips up along Lancelot's calves. The muscles were taut, though elsewhere the wide-eyed knight was woefully relaxed, and Sagramore worked his fingers into the knots he found, nursing them to the gradual, aching heat that marked a thorough massage. Mail, shield, and lance were never an easy burden for a man horsed, and a lingering wound would as oft as not leave scars to pull and twist awry, so many a knight needed the attentions of his squire's hands to relax bunched muscles to ply flesh like clay on a potter's wheel. The squires, in turn, practiced on one another as they did all such skills, but many fell out of the habit once they were created, and had squires of their own to pass such duties to.

 

Sagramore had not let the skill grow stale. Ignoring his own inclinations, he worked at the corded strength in Lancelot's legs, taking hold of one as a lever and maneuvering the knight onto his back. His hands, chaste now as holy doves, wandering only up the outside of Lancelot's thighs, thumbs rubbing deep circles up from his hips, until finally he said simply, “Turn.” Lancelot did so with no little relief, presenting his back with a virgin's innocence.

 

Sagramore would have laughed, but dared not. Now he could feel the muscle groups begin to ease their tensions as soon as they were touched, before his probing fingers could untangle them. It was trust, and he would not threaten it. He knelt over Lancelot, surrendered but unvanquished yet, and tried to ponder anything but the perfection of that turned back with its lean, well-distinguished musculature, it's smooth skin, and the cap of curls on Lancelot's head, perfect for knotting fingers in, as handsome as his plain, open face could not be.

 

He had boasted that Lancelot's lance was surely no match for his own Bruce-saunce-pit

é

, and he tried not to wonder at that question either, knowing that some soldiers slouched at rest and stretched at attention.

 

He could not rush this. But neither could he savor it, until Lancelot had relaxed and begun to do so as well. He kneaded his hands in Lancelot's lower back, and hoped that it was sufficiently unthreatening. Fingernails along his sides, palms and thumbs digging deeply to wring out years of soreness, of tension, of denial.

 

He did not know how long he had been doing this when Lancelot groaned, and shifted under his hands. Sagramore breathed wordless recognition. That was a piece of body language he knew all too well.

 

“Turn,” he said again, leaning back, and with an altogether different manner of relief, Lancelot did.

 

Sagramore let his hand drift, cautiously, along the inward curve of Lancelot's thigh, searching for nervous tension, for knotted fear, and finding none. Then, he moved his hand farther, and resumed his massage. As Lancelot moved under his hand, breathing unsteadily, muscles flexing, neck stretching, as though he were bound and in search of some escape, Sagramore smiled. This, he had seen before, in many a squire deprived of indulgence overlong. Every one of his nerves would be singing, every muscle trying to express the bliss that spilled into them, as other parts were overwhelmed. He slowed his hand, lest this be over too quickly. His left hand, he brought forward to tease in broad circles and slow caresses everything from Lancelot's firm-muscled stomach to his calves, ranging wherever he could reach.

 

Another lover, he would have whispered to – encouragement, endearments, calculated obscenities to match the complicated obscenities their bodies were joyfully engaged in. With Lancelot, he forebore, unwilling to do anything that might trigger guilt, that might remind the virginal knight of anything but his body's gratification, and its gratitude thereby. Sagramore had not realized that he would enjoy this, this egoless silent ministration, that without taking pleasure for himself he would find it nonetheless. He toyed with the notion of taking his left hand off of Lancelot, and rousing himself further – but there was still hope, at least, that Lancelot might prove interested in the matter later, and at the moment Sagramore did not wish to deprive him of the least chance for indulgence. 

 

His smile grew as Lancelot's wordless calls grew in volume, and he let the motion of his hands harmonize, speeding slowly toward the point where Lancelot's voice would fracture, and he watched in gloating delight as he massaged the last of Lancelot's discipline away into complete surrender. Lost in the height of its pleasure, that plain face was beautiful, he thought, nearly beyond description. 

 

Afterward he stopped almost immediately, teasing only a little, wary of over-tender nerves in the wake of that flood of joy. When Lancelot opened his eyes, Sagramore was licking clean his thumb, slowly.

 

“I think,” Sagramore said, “you have been overthrown at joust at last, my lord.”

 

“I think,” Lancelot offered him hoarsely, “that I have a tilt left yet to ride.”

 

It was nigh to dawn before they noticed that the sand had grown cold. The water of the lake was no longer boiling.

 

They debated, briefly, whether or not it would be wise to confront Gwyddrhiain direct and demand their release, but it was decided at last that they would not – for what if she was satisfied, and would choose one of them now as her lover? The chance Sagramore once saw there he no longer desired. And this was no quest they would repeat at the Table, for the gory and worship that would come from it – as they had vanquished the curse, there was no reason to linger and try the Lady as well.

 

Together, armor shed and abandoned, they towed Gawain across the lake. Lancelot swam like a fish, and bade Sagramore have no fear of the shapes that moved beneath the water. The only danger they found themselves in was when Gawain awoke, thrashing and confused, halfway across the water, and Sagramore met the challenge of it with delight, explaining what he could while he sputtered and tread water. 

 

On the far shore, anxious, Urre waited for them with their horses. That he had found Lancelot, and not Arthur's court, was a gratitude Sagramore could not explain to him, nor cared to.

 

It was still May, the month of dalliance, when they returned to Camelot. The whole of their ride, Sagramore and Lancelot had slept with the breadth of the camp lying between them. But that space was filled, now, with ease and trust. They spent their evenings in conversation, circumspectly, of fey mores, and told Gawain they had proved themselves true to Gwyddrhiain, if not how.

 

If either of them had thought to fear that Lancelot's drive would be made less by having his pleasures increased, his passions diluted, Sagramore would have dismissed the notion now. The man still moved with the force and direction of a storm. There was still aught he wanted, that Sagramore could not supply. Nor would he try. The last he said of the matter, he leaned sideways to murmur in Lancelot's ear as they rode at last within sight of the Queen's Maying party.

 

“Betimes,” he suggested, “should you need a confessor to cleanse you of fairy sins yet again...”

 

He could not tell from the distant, longing look in Lancelot's eyes whether the other knight had heard him.

**Author's Note:**

> As with almost any modern attempt at Arthurian fiction, I owe numerous debts to earlier sources. The non-romantic parts of the plot were inspired by _Segremors_ , a fragmented 13th century German poem which I have read only summaries of. Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ and White's _Once and Future King_ were, as usual, indispensable. My primary debt, however, is to an 1896 doctoral thesis called _Studies In The Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance_ , by Lucy Allen Paton. Doctor Paton would be appalled from how I have deviated from the standard formula of a fairy romance, I am sure, but I credit her with giving me a script to deviate from.
> 
> I have interpreted Sagramore as having either Frontal Lobe or Temporal Lobe epilepsy. http://www.epilepsy.com and wikipedia both provided me with a wealth of data, and I only hope I did justice to the information I studied about the symptoms and experience. Sagramore's seizure is, if I have my terminology right, complex partial, tonic-clonic, and Jacksonian. If my depiction is incorrect or offensive in any substantial way, please feel free to correct me, and I will listen.
> 
> I could find no mention of Sagramore's father's name, so Caradoc (Karadachis) Aurifaber is my own piece of speculation. Hilaria, however, was the daughter of Emperor Zeno, giving Sagramore a plausible claim to the throne, as he is said to in other sources.
> 
> The Welsh place names are my own amateurish translations and conjugations, and I can only hope they resemble accuracy. Gwyddrhiain, roughly, translates as "goose-maiden."
> 
> I hope you enjoy the story.


End file.
